A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [200]
It was now that he began to speak to his children of his childhood. He told them of the hut, the men digging in the garden at night; he told them of the oil that was later found on the land. What fortune might have been theirs, if only his father had not died, if only he had stuck to the land like his brothers, if he had not gone to Pagotes, not become a sign-writer, not gone to Hanuman House, not married! If only so many things had not happened!
He blamed his father; he blamed his mother; he blamed the Tulsis; he blamed Shama. Blame succeeded blame confusedly in his mind; but more and more he blamed the Sentinel, and hinted savagely to Shama, almost as if she were on the board of the paper, that he was going to keep his eye open for another job, and that if the worst came to the worst he would get a job as a labourer with the Americans.
‘Labourer!’ Shama said. ‘With those hammocks you have for muscles, I would like to see how long you would last.’
Which either made him angry, or reduced him to an absurd puckishness. Then, lying on the Slumberking in vest and pants, as was his wont when he indulged in speculations about the future, he would lift up one leg and prod the slack calf with a finger, or make it swing, as he had done when they were newly married, in the long room at Hanuman House. These were the times (for the children were not excluded from this talk about money) when Mr Biswas delivered insincere homilies on the honest manner of his livelihood, and told his children that he had nothing to leave them but good education and a sound training.
It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that ‘journalist’ was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his father worked for the Americans. ‘That is what all of them are saying these days,’ Anand said. ‘Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?’
Mr Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.
Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the school – what did the boys call their parents? – Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said, ‘Bap and Mai,’ and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school, unhesitatingly said, ‘Mummy and Daddy.’ For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed ambition, push and uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with laden hampers.
Mr Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the Sentinel to go to work for the Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island forever. But as a gesture of protest against the Sentinel, he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites League of the Guardian, the rival paper; and in the Junior Guardian, for years thereafter, Mr Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced when W. C. Tuttle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.
The Sentinel had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors that there might be something wrong with their policy